The Irish songs on the Maine coast were in most cases brought over directly by bold sailors, sturdy fishermen or good craftsmen who came as settlers at an early period, married Yankee girls, and identified themselves with the native English stock as the laborers and forced immigrants of the Famine period had never done. The latter class had the comic “Paddy” songs of the middle of the last century, but the old balladry of Ireland which we find abundantly along the Maine coast came here very much earlier.

British Ballads from Maine, Phillips Barry, Fanny Hardy Eckstorm & Mary Smyth, 1929